Today's Mudline

March 3, 2015

South Dakota state Sen. Isaac Latterell on Planned Parenthood: "Worse than ISIS."....Keith Olbermann on Penn State students: "Pitiful."....Bill O'Reilly on David Corn: "A left-wing assassin...A guttersnipe liar...I expect [him] to be in the kill zone. Where he deserves to be."....Corn on O'Reilly: "It's impossible to win a debate with O'Reilly because he is not bound by reality."....Rudy Giuliani: "I don't believe the president loves America. He doesn't love you. He doesn't love me."....NY Daily News on Giuliani: "Loves America. But apparently he hates Barack Obama even more."....David Axelrod on Giuliani: "A fading politician, kind of lighting himself on fire and trying to get some attention."....Sally Kohn on Giuliani remarks: "Narrow-minded, ugly and just plain offensive."....Hannibal Buress on fans: "Stop calling me your f***ing spirit animal."....

Daily Briefing

Deep buzz for the content-deprived

Every weekday, while you get showered and dressed, we pluck these dewy-
fresh, breaking stories from the info-clogged byways of the datasphere.
Pour yourself a cup of coffee and stoke up on everything you need to know,
or at least enough to fake it.

Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”...

Nearly nine years of war in Iraq have produced a growing cadre of world-class, homegrown Iraqi news photographers. Some started out with little technical knowledge but a strong desire to document their country's experience. Within months, they were producing work that became increasingly crucial to the world's understanding of Iraq. These are the stories of five of those photojournalists, with a sampling of their images...

Egyptian Military Police Beating a Female Protester Produces Fury and an Apology

The video image of military police savagely beating a female protester has reignited national debate, galvanized the country's stalled women's movement, and forced an apology from the country's ruling generals...

We've all seen those color-coded air-quality charts on the news—warnings about smog, ozone, and pollen. Now it may be time to add a new alert to the list: illegal drugs. Researchers have found that regions with greater cocaine and marijuana use have higher levels of these drugs in the surrounding atmosphere..

Christopher Hitchens and the Iraq War ended on the same day, December 15, 2011—a historical coincidence that only he might have known what to do with. In the trajectory of his career as brilliant talker and polemicist, man of letters, self-dramatizing personality, and traveller to bad places, Iraq was the turning point. Until then, his work fit roughly within the conventions of the left. Given the deadliness of much left-wing writing in the age of Reagan, Hitchens achieved the rare feat of being dazzling while sticking fairly closely to political orthodoxy...

Like 75 percent of Americans and most of Congress, I supported the war with Iraq. Much of that support was the result of selected intelligence from the Bush administration. The White House suffered a systemic breakdown, with a vice president and secretary of defense more focused on justifying a war than showing the type of caution our troops deserve before being sent to fight in a foreign land...